Orion Labs completes $18.25M in Funding to Expand its Next Generation Voice Platform for Real-time Business
Press Release, Orion, 2017/09/08
While I was in Poland I joked with the translator that he would need to find a new job soon. He assured me he was find for now. Well, maybe not. Here's Orion. "Starting today, all customers have access to a preview of Translator, Orion’s new real-time voice translation bot. Orion’s Translator gives users the ability to speak in English and have their message instantly translated to Spanish, or the other way around." It's by the company which makes Onyx, "a compact, lightweight wearable for real-time, heads-up walkie-talkie-style communication over any distance with other Onyx users." Onyx is currently shipping to the U.S. and Canada; the Android app works with Onyx to provide access to Orion.
A free, teacher-less university in France is schooling thousands of future-proof programmers
Jenny Anderson, Quartz, 2017/09/08
You might think there's a lot I like about this tuition-free school, where the curriculum consists of nothing more than projects given go students (at 8L:42 a.m.; they get 48 hours to complete them). The students manage everything else, up to and including the design of the elevator ("hip-hop blaring from the speakers and blue and green lights piercing the darkness") to grading to the food truck out back. It does work (100% of the students get jobs) but it's easy to be successful when you're very selective (1,000 of 64K applicants) and when the students have independent income ("three years is a long time to forego a salary, even if students get internships along the way"). I also don't agree that "the ultimate gauge of success, of course, is jobs." The ultimate gauge is more like satisfaction in life. This article doesn't report on that. Still, "for thousands of young people who have limited options, School 42 offers a wealth of opportunity: an education, a community, and real-life skills that are in high demand among employers." That's not nothing.
Digital badging for facilitating virtual recognition of an achievement
John Arlan Brock, 2017/09/08
Audrey Watters points to this patent granted to SalesForce for digital badges, or more specifically "a computer-implemented method of facilitating virtual recognition of an achievement implemented in a database system communicatively coupled with a social networking system." It has a priority date of 2014 (in other words, well after digital badges were invented). It also refers to users using Netscape's Navigator browser, so there's a bit of cookie-cutter language in there. I don't really have much use for the patent system in our field; it's basically a way for people with enough money to file patents to claim ownership of stuff other people have invented. But hey, my hat's off to John Arlan Brock, the "inventor" of digital badging for facilitating virtual recognition of an achievement.
Feedback: It’s all it cracked up to be!
Brett D. Christensen, Workplace Performance, 2017/09/08
This is a nice discussion of feedback based on the example of traffic signs. Brett Christensen talks about the signs in his town that display your speed as you drive by; they're used to encourage better behaviour in things like school zones. And they work, but only under certain conditions. The sign should provide feedback on your actual performance. It should be located where there's a real need, and if it's a permanant installation, people will get used to it, and it will be ignored. That explains why the speed sign in my village of Casselman is moved around town. And it explains why it strobes when I'm going too fast (but not why it strobes when I am travelling at precisely the speed limit). "The key," says Christensen, "is (1) appropriate feedback can increase performance, (2) too much won’t have that same positive effect and (3) when you are the person providing the feedback, asking your employee... could help you find that sweet spot!"
OPERAS Design Study
OPERAS, 2017/09/08
According to the website, "OPERAS is a distributed research infrastructure project in Europe to support the development of open scholarly communication," especially in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The design studiy was released over the summer, and has four parts: a landscape study that "identifies recent developments and challenges within the scholaly communication framework," a technical mapping that "provides a global description of the technical, organizational and information systems within the OPERAS consortium," a usage study "describing current practices regarding open access, the evaluation of existing services, the missing services, and the level of interest for integrated new services," and a European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) landscape study. There's a wealth of information here and it wouldn't be the worst idea to use this project as a template for similar projects elsewhere. OPERAS stands for "open access in the European Research Area through scholarly communication," though I doubt this full title is used very much. Note that it would be nice to see the project use an RSS feel or some sort of syndicated communication over and above its monthly PDF newsletter and social media accounts.
More Or Less Technology In The Classroom? We’re Asking The Wrong Question
Cathy Davidson, Fast Company, 2017/09/07
I'm not sure whether Catrhy Davidson's description of MOOC as "Massive Open Online Courseware" is a deliberate commentary or an accidental oversight. I prefer to think it's the former, especially in the context of her denunciation of tech hyperbole. But in adition to criticizing technophilia she is equally harsh on technophobia. "Most of the technophobic responses to devices assume that school should be cordoned off from the real world," she writes, and they make claims about whether tech improves or hams students' grades. But "that’s the wrong metric," she argues. "The purpose of education should not be better grades or a diploma. It should be the best possible preparation for thriving in a complex and changing world." And we should be focusing on improving practice. "The best pedagogical research we have reinforces the idea that learning in the classroom is most effective when it proceeds pretty much the way it does when we try to master something new outside of school: learning incrementally, being challenged, trying again." I'm in broad agreement with all this.
‘Open Innovation Initiative’ By Blackboard To Lure Open Source Developers
Moodle News, 2017/09/07
The gist of the announcement is this: "Blackboard has made a series of announcements and releases to make it easier to code functionality for the commercial LMS. They are wrapped into what Blackboard calls the 'Open Innovation Initiative' that gives developers access to REST and LTI integrations to expand Blackboard services without upfront costs." The unnamed Moodle News author suggests it has the "likely goal of enticing more learning developers to adopt its platform." Of course, it's institutions, not developers, that adopt platforms. What Blackboard wants to do is to extend its reach into other applications, and it need to help the developers of those applications write the interfaces that will make this possible. It's always a good strategy to create an open API, but I would never write an application that depends on a single company's API, because it's too easy for them to turn off the taps.
A Philosopher-Grammarian Gets Something Right
Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/09/07
Michael Dummett wrote some of the most dense prose I ever had the displeasure of reading, so it's hard to imagine enjoying his book on grammar. But as Geoffrey Pullum writes, although Dummett's book contains a fair degree of crank, it also offers some surprisingly lucid advice on defining parts of speech. Verbs are not 'doing' words, they're words that can vary in tense. Subjects are not 'things', they are words that play a specific role in a sentence. "Being a subject is not an enduring trait of any word, like being an adverb; it is a role played within a sentence by a word or phrase, which may play a different role in other sentences." Good stuff. Image: Columbia.
What Personalized Learning Is Not
Kenya Ransey, EdSurge, 2017/09/07
Overall this article makes some good points, though it is a bit unfocused. Kenya Ramsey defends the idea of personal choice in personalized learning. So personalized learning is not merely selection of options from a list, nor is it having teachers design individualized lesson plans. She also things it should be organic and fluid, and therefore, not something that can only happen with technology, and not something that can be neatly defined in a textbook. That's as far as this article goes, which leaves the reader wanting more.
The Massively Open On Air Courses (MOOAC): Contextualizing MOOCs in Africa
Rebecca Yvonne Bayeck, e/merge Africa, YouTube, 2017/09/06
Education in Africa faces numerous challenges: infrastructure, affordances, teacher shortages and distance. MOOCs can be deployed to address these issues. But few African students actually attend MOOCs. Access to the internet is still very limited (about 9 percent) in Africa. So this presentation looks like an adaptation of MOOCs - open On Air Courses, delivering instruction over the radio. The presentation itself is about 20 minutes, with the remaining 35 minutes devoted to discussion. See more from the MOOCs in Africa video series in this playlist.
I used to think social media was a force for good. Now the evidence says I was wrong
Matt Haig, The Guardian, 2017/09/06
This article conflates the social harm caused by social media ("the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart") with the personal harm caused by social media ("inspiring feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and self-loathing"). Maybe internet addition and filter bubbles have the same underlying pathology, but aside from both being associated with social media I don't see the connection. That weakens this article, because it's not enough to say that social media is bad in all kinds of ways; we need to be able to say why it is bad, in which way, so we can fix it. Because as bad as it is, social media fills a need. We use it to talk to each other. It's easy to say that this talk should be regulated, or attached to identities, or curated, but the way in which these are managed also counts.
Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments
Michael Deangelo, The Mozilla Blog, 2017/09/06
I had a look at the code and it looks like it's still a bit of a project to install. But I like the distributed approach ("every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. ") and I like its approach to data ("Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance.") I want to get a version running for OLDaily, because I think we need open and non-commercial forums where we can talk about this stuff. I also think it could work well with gRSShopper for MOOC and PLE development and deployment.
Domain-Driven Design Reference: Definitions and Pattern Summaries
Eric Evans, 2017/09/06
This post is the very tip of a huge body of knowledge. At the beginning of the 20th century L.E.J (Bertus) Brouwer developed a theory of "intuitionist" mathematics incorporating the idea that math is a creation within the context of a Weltanschauung, or world view. In the late 20th-century rejection of logical positivism in favour of constructivist theories we see the development of alternative logics, including intuitionist, or constructivist, logic, where "constructive proofs correspond to functional programs and vice versa" related to a state space or model. This supports in turn a design methodology where "Multiple models are in play on any large project." This is the world of domain driven design (DDD).
What's key here is how this plays out in practice: "Model expressions, like any other phrase, only have meaning in context." Therefore, "Explicitly define the context within which a model applies... Recognize that a change in the language is a change to the model... Those who contribute in different ways must consciously engage those who touch the code in a dynamic exchange of model ideas through the ubiquitous language." Take this one step further and you get Command and Query Response Seqregation (CQRS) which allows us to use different data models which use the same data. My colleague Andriy Drozdyuk is presenting on this next week in Ottawa.
This is the logical, linguistic and computational foundation for constructivist, identity-based and community-based philosophies of education and society. It succeeds or fails because of its dependence on an ubiquitious language (hence the importance of Lakoff today). So long as this language requires an interpretation, it is vulnerable. The less contentious the interpretation the more stable the foundation. Ultimately, in my opinion, we have to push representation down, push it beyond representation, to a subsymbolic and directly accessible level.
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design
John Spencer, The Synapse, 2017/09/06
Nice article from John Spencer applying elements of user experience design (UX) to the design of online courses. I like the graphic (though it bothers me a little that the text does not follow the same order as the graphic). "UX design focuses on both on how we use digital tools and on how we inhabit digital spaces," writes Spencer. "It focuses on systems in a way that is deeply human. What does it feel like for people? What does it look like for them? What are their processes?"
Where to find all of the slides, links, videos and tutorials from Wikimania 2017 (and what we learned from having a remote-first strategy)
Melody Kramer, Wikimedia Blg, 2017/09/06
I spent most of my time with this article analyzing the 'class photo' for signs of tribal identity (note: not a good thing). They have their own salute and appear to have mascots. The different versions of the salute look like they denote degrees of membership: there's the group that did it correctly (thumb and single forefinger forming a clear 'W'), the group that was sort of right (thumbs joined correctly but with all fingers being used to created a 'winged W'), the group that just got it wrong(crossed thumbs, for example), and the 'out there' group who made salutes using pinky fingers, metal-head hands, or hang-loose gestures. I also looked for diversity and didn't really find it (this session, at least, addresses it, and some of the built-in biases - see esp. 46:00 ff - I wonder why this was streamed to Facebook while some keynotes (but not the good talks) and many of the sessions went to Youtube (and some even to Wikimedia Commons!). And I'm surprised they would try to run a conference in Montreal (and streamed internationally) without simultaneous translation.
Invitation to Join: CC Open Education Platform
Cable Green, Creative Commons, 2017/09/05
I've signed up or this (specifically: the email list, the Slack channel, and the draft working document) mostly because I advocate open education, and a little bit less because I think an organization like Creative Commons can deliver on it. It's part of CC's new "platforms" initiative. "Part of the new strategy is to establish defined areas of focus, or “platforms,” which will drive CC’s global activities. Platforms are how we organize areas of work for the CC community, where individuals and institutions organize and coordinate themselves across the CC Global Network." I'm not sure I like the term - depending on your perspetcive, it makes you think of either a political party or a social network service, neirther of which have done education (or democracy, or equity) any favours lately. But I'll begin with an open mind. Image: Alan Levine.
This is not the online learning you (or we) are looking for
CogDogBlog, 2017/09/05
Alan Levine delivers a classic take-down of some online learning shovelware (it takes me back a couple of decades to read criticism like this). "This course had no voice, no character, no personality," he writes. "This is brutal, content-centric, non-human, un-empathetic design."
Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues
Natasha Singer, New York Times, 2017/09/05
I've seen this cited in a bunch of places (eg. Larry Cuban, Tim Stahmer, Doug Levin), and I've seen any number of the teacher-brands the article refers to (they're also the one's getting their students to vote for them in various contests). The tenor of the article (and most of the commentary) is that what they're doing is wrong. Accepting technology in exchange for endorsements is "a very questionable activity," says Fordham's Joel Reidenberg. And the article criticizes teacher certifications, saying they are like a "Google certified doctor" or "Pfizer distinguished nurse". But endorsement by private corporations is widespread. Doctors and nurses are affiliated with hospitals and HMOs. Nobody questioned things like "certified Novell Engineer" or PMI certification for managers. Or for that matter a Harvard MBA. So how does it become wrong when teachers engage in the same practice of endorsement and marketing. Sure, it's not for me (but then, I'm not living on poverty-level wages). But I don't think it's reasonable to expect teachers to play by different rules than all those people making more money than they are.
Why Higher Ed Needs to Bridge the Critical Thinking Skills Gap
Frank Connolly , EdSurge, 2017/09/05
I agree that "providing appropriate guidance in critical thinking needs to become a central part of the college value proposition," but I don't think this article makes the case very well. It's based on a Wall Street Journal examination of the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) test, described as "a standardized testing initiative designed to measure college students’ critical thinking skills." Examples here. They studied one school "critical thinking is baked into many different courses, rather than being the formal subject of any one course" (which is contrary to the usual recommendation, which is probably why "similar courses at other schools did not achieve similar success"). Next it cites a survey where "university admissions officers report that students have a hard time remembering facts," which is both a poor data source and also irrelevant to the subject of critical thinking. The main point seems to be to criticize world views where "facts exist independently of reality" (what would Wittgenstein say? (hint: these tests that purport to be objective assessments aren't)).
Information Underload and OER Leverage
David Wiley, iterating toward openness, 2017/09/05
I'm going to agree with David Wiley today. The problem of education (and of open educational resources (OER)) is not a search problem. " If I’m going to mostly find resources I could have made in 15 – 30 minutes, how much time can I possibly save by decreasing mean time to discovery?" On the other hand, says Wiley, "if I work the other side of the problem – creating larger, more useful OER – there’s an opportunity to create significant leverage." That is, if large and more useful OER are what is needed. It might be that the 100-hour OER does the same job as the 15-minute OER (it wouldn't be the first time I've seen that). But, in general, we agree: the focus on discovery is of limited value.
Theories and Frameworks for Online Education: Seeking an Integrated Model
Anthony G. Picciano, Online Learning (OLJ), 2017/09/05
I don't think this article is nuanced enough in some important ways, but it is interesting in its own right and serves as a breezy introduction to some of the major theories of learning and pedagogy. It begins by defining what a theory is and then identifying three major branches of theory: behaviourism, cognitivism, and social constructivism. It then looks at "extensions" of these approaches, including the Community of Inquiry and Connectivism. Pulling the concepts together, it describes Anderson's 2011 model, and from there, drafts a simplified account that can be used to characterze different types of theory. Where it fails, I think, is where most such theories fail: it is to a large extent a taxonomy, defining theories in this case by different types of interaction. But taxonomies are not theories. They merely describe, and do not explain, and without an explanation, a description is arbitrary and subjective.
Revised Community of Inquiry Framework: Examining Learning Presence in a Blended Mode of Delivery
Jessica Pool, Gerda Reitsma, Dirk Van den Berg, Online Learning (OLJ), 2017/09/05
The Community of Inquiry model (CoI) postulates three types of presence: social, teachning, and cognitive presence. These presences can be direct, or they can be mediated through technology (such as books or digital communications). This paper (13 page PDF) examines an extension of that model, proposed by Shea and Bidjerano (2010), to include learning presence, described as "students’ proactive use of specific processes such as goal setting, strategy selection and personal monitoring of effectiveness." The authors studied a blended learning course for evidence of learning presence and found that "learning presence was established in this blended learning course, but it was influenced by the self-regulation skills of the students." I have always liked the idea of 'presence' - it's he difference feel when talking with a human and talking with a robot - but as a subjective feel is is difficult to describe and measure with clarity.
There Is Power In A Union
Billy Bragg, YouTube, 2017/09/04
There is power in a factory, there is power in the land
There is power in the hands of the worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a union
How many people believe learning styles theories are right? And why?
Daniel Willingham, Science & Education, 2017/09/04
Why does Daniel Willingham continue to rail on about learning styles theories? After more than a decade, most people wrap up a discussion and move on to a different topic. He is, in fact, arguing against something very specific. After all, he agrees that "he style distinctions (visual vs. auditory; verbal vs. visual) often correspond to real differences in ability. Some people are better with words, some with space, and so on." Where he disagrees with the theory is where people argue that "everyone can reach the same cognitive goal via these different abilities." This corresponds to what he has always said: that it is the nature of the content that dictates how it should be taught, not the nature of the learner. But why would this matter so much that he comes back to it year after year. I think it's to reassert, again and again, that learning is about content, not learners. And there's where we disagree. If you're pushing content into a learner, then you focus on the content. But if you're developing the learner, you focus on the learner. The former can be mass produced by publishers and content vendors. The latter can't.
Translating course descriptions from XCRI-CAP to schema.org
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2017/09/04
One of the things I've learned working with the new version of mooc.ca is that course providers pay very little attention to syndicating their content (and typically even those that syndicate would really rather you simply stayed with their site, and many absolutely won't let you export content out of their environment). And of course there's little to no consistency in course syndication formats. I've been working with course syndication formats for many years - I've worked with LOM and IMS content packaging, created an RSS-LOM, and more recently have been working with various JSON formats. Here we have old-school XML specifications, and a crosswalk between a couple of them, XCRI-CAP (eXchanging Course Related Information, Course Advertising Profile) and schema.org json-ld.
Give it Up for Let’s Encrypt
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2017/09/04
There is a push afoot - led by Google but supported by multitudes - to move the entire web to encrypted communication. Websites which use 'https' are encrypted, but the others aren't. Encryption requires a certificate, which has always been the stumbling block, because these require verified identity, and they can be expensive, especially if (like me) you're running a number of domains. Jim Groom's post highlights Let's Encrypt, an effort to get free certificates into the hands of website owners in a drive to encrypt everything. I'll have to wait until January of 2018 for the wildcard certificates. Also, while I've gone through the install process a few times now (once for downes.ca which has a now-expired certificate, and also for my mail server) it still remains mysterious and complicated.
We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why
Nick Srnicek, The Guardian, 2017/09/04
This post has been making the rounds recently, and it was no doubt calculated to generate the negative response it's receiving. And let me jump on board and agree that nationalizing social media is a dumb idea. We would never generate the value for the money we'd spend. But. There is an argument for noncommercial alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, an analogue to public mail delivery or public broadcasting. The sort of model I would envision would be a public service providing each person with web server space and a distributed social media app (along the lines of Mastodon, but where each person could have their own individual instance). The trick is doing it on a cost-effective basis (though note that the government spends upward of $1 billion on the CBC (about $27 per Canadian (money well spent))).
Neural Nets for Generating Music
Kyle McDonald, Medium, Artists and Machine Intelligence, 2017/09/04
This is an interesting and very detailed examination of attempts to create music using artificial intelligence. It tracks what are (to my mind) two major stages in the evolution of this work: first, the shift from symbolic representations of music to actual samples of music; and second, the shift to convolutional neural networks: "Convolutional networks learn combinations of filters. They’re normally used for processing images, but WaveNet treats time like a spatial dimension." It makes me think: that's why humans haave short-term memory (STM). Not as a staging area for long-term memory (LTM) but as a way of treating time as a spatial dimension. There's the obligatory question of whether these will replace humans, posed at the very end of the article (to no effect whatsoever) and a look at the use of these techniques to generate spoken word audio.
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Copyright 2017 Stephen Downes Contact: [email protected]
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